Australian biotech: Views from the inside

IT HAS been a year of growing pains for Australian biotechnology. Until recently, the sector had been suffering an unprecedented growth spurt, manifested by a slew of companies floating on the Australian Stock Exchange. Unfortunately, many of them floated too early and are now struggling for money as their share prices plummet.

To compound the industry's teenage woes, the Australian government and investors have been showering love, and money, on the country's original economic sweetheart, the natural resources industry, which is experiencing something of a boom.

None of this appears to have daunted the biotech sector. It is still growing - albeit at a slower pace - and remains a stable and rewarding area in which to work as a scientist.

The number of jobs in the industry continues to increase, says Jeremy Wurm, managing director of life science recruitment specialists Brooker Ruston Poole, as a result of a relatively steady supply of university spin-off companies.

Meanwhile, the established companies are getting bigger as they move into clinical development and raise more money. More and more of them are buying each other out or merging to fill gaps in their technology pipelines. "There are larger companies around now that can afford to pay more and support career paths," says Michael Vitale, director of the innovation research programme at Melbourne Business School.

New Scientist spoke to three ambassadors for Australian biotechnology - each of them representing a different facet of the industry - and discovered a sector that is showing the world a new-found maturity.

Andrew Laslett

Stem cell researcher, Australian Stem Cell Centre

For Andrew Laslett, it's not about the hype or the controversy. He is interested in stem cells for a simple reason: a sense of awe about how we develop from a single cell into a complex organism comprising millions more. "The first time I looked down a microscope and saw cells rhythmically beating in time with each other, stem cells that had spontaneously differentiated into heart cells, it left me with quite an eerie feeling," he says.

One of some 270 scientists funded by the Australian Stem Cell Centre (ASCC), which has its headquarters in Melbourne, Laslett focuses his research on the early stages in the differentiation of a stem cell into the myriad cell types that make up the human body. He is particularly interested in so-called pluripotent cells, which have the potential to become any type of cell, and his team recently came up with a way to pick these out from a bundle of others so that they can be studied in detail. Biologists can identify cells by looking for particular proteins on their surface, and pluripotent cells have a surface marker called Oct-4. The relative proportion of Oct-4 and other markers helps the researchers find out which are progressing towards becoming heart, blood or liver cells, for example.

Laslett trained in reproductive biology, working in the US before returning to his native Australia to work with Martin Pera at the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development in Victoria. When the ASCC was founded in 2003, it set up its own laboratories at Monash University near Melbourne and Laslett was one of the scientists to move to the labs, initially working under Pera and later with his own funding. He is now also part of the Renal Regeneration Consortium, a group of Australian stem cell scientists and researchers on the trail of a stem cell capable of differentiating into most if not all types of cell found in the kidney.

"We're not trying to grow a kidney in a dish, but trying to find early cells that become most of the cell types in the kidney," he says. "We've had some early encouraging results, but they are very difficult cells to grow."

Ultimately, Laslett says, kidney stem cells could be injected into a damaged kidney to repair and repopulate it, although he cautions that the research is still in its infancy. It is likely to be many years before the research is advanced enough to test in humans.

One hurdle might be Australia's stem cell legislation, which is currently under review by the federal government. The debate is focused on whether to legalise therapeutic cloning. Laslett says the law does not restrict his current research, although he believes that further down the road this approach might provide a way to create kidney stem cells that can be used therapeutically without provoking immune rejection. The government appears to be divided, but recent polls suggest that the most recently drafted bill, which legalises therapeutic cloning, will probably pass if put to the vote - although it will be close.

Despite this, the government is supportive of bioscience research as a whole, and has over recent years substantially increased the amount of funding to the major research agencies, including the National Health and Medical Research Council, and the Australian Research Council (ARC).

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